Conservatives, enduring forever the same

We all know a conservative when we see one.  And they know who they are too, without ever having to use the word.  After all, they’re just regular decent folk.  They don’t have to say what they’re for—and lord knows they don’t have to explain or defend what they’re for—because all the decent folk they know already know what they’re for.  And they certainly don’t have to bother explaining themselves to the rest.  If those softheaded ingrates don’t already get it, they never will.  Bless their hearts.  They are welcome to go back to wherever they came from.

But there’s always a few septic-stirrers who insist on asking useless questions, just so they can hear themselves spout airy-fairy nonsense (and get public grants for it).  We all know who.  Liberals, radicals and other communists.  And so they eagerly exploit their license to waste our public oxygen with their precious theories, knowing that the more outrageous and contrary to common sense they are, the more they will be lauded.  (And the more public money will be awarded them to waste on more useless questions.)  One can only imagine the sort of patented nonsense they will come up with next.

Observation 3: Conservatism is the determination to preserve social advantage.  Conservatives often insist (just ask them!) that they are preserving tradition—also known as the way things have always been or just the way things ought to be.  But what they’re really protecting is a very special kind of tradition, one in which they themselves hold a position of privilege or relative advantage over others.  They may not see their present position as advantaged, and will inevitably justify their present good standing as the proper reward of hard work, or superior virtue, or associating with the right sort of people (that is, true honest folk), or shrewdly gaining membership among the chosen few, to which they and their kind clearly belong.  The good lord does not go around granting success and advantage to just anyone.  No, indeed.  He of course knows who the deserving are.  And if they happen to enjoy advantage (which remains unclear, considering how poorly treated and unappreciated they are), they have obviously earned it.  And they have earned it because God has wisely placed them above all the others.

So conservatism is a kind of virtuous conspiracy.  (At least you don’t have to convince conservatives that conspiracies are real!)  But all in plain sight.  It’s hardly surprising that socially-advantaged human beings go to considerable lengths to preserve their advantages.  Humans are social creatures.  Advantages are social goods.  Most things that human beings value are situated in some kind of social context—family, religion, wealth, competitive sport, patriotism, decency.  But though human beings are fundamentally devoted to social values, they are not nearly so devoted to the value of social equality.  They compare themselves incessantly to one another—to those above, to those below, to those inside and outside.  Patriotism and family values are explicit preferences for some kinds of people over others.  Professional and financial strivings represent a determination to end up on the ascendant side of their inevitable inequalities.  Those individuals who already hold advantage over others naturally wish to preserve and enhance their advantage.  And possessing the advantage, they have the means to do so.  They have better connections, preferential access to government (both its power and its services), dibs on health-care and elite education—and from the latter even more connections.  Those who don’t have these advantages would clearly like to have them, and so are often willing to see the inequalities preserved (for a better future).  But not everyone can have their way.  Status and advantage are entirely relational concepts, all the more valuable for being rare.  For one person to win, another must lose—including some who may be within one’s familiar and loyal communities.  So best not rely too much on talent and hard work.  Those most likely to gain social advantage are those who already have it.

Conservatives, being conservatives, naturally prefer to protect the existing and established accomplishments of the privileged members of society over the potential achievements of the presently disadvantaged.  If conservatism is the preservation of tradition—which is another word for status quo—it will necessarily appeal to those who have done comparatively well under the present order (that is, the privileged).  The privileged naturally want to protect what they already possess, and, if possible, to extend it.  Since the advantaged have, by definition, disproportionate control of current resources, they are well positioned to use those advantages to gain more advantage.  The disadvantaged cannot fairly compete and so are likelier to lose standing relative to those who begin from advantaged starting places.

But do we not say A rising tide lifts all boats?  The advantaged love to repeat that phrase.  It may even be true in some contexts, as long as we concede that the tide rises much faster and higher for those who already have the biggest boats.  Smaller boats, smaller swells.  So we should rephrase: The rising tide lifts highest those who already have the biggest boats.

Ancient Rome was a very successful social (not to mention conquering) enterprise.  And though no other people thrived so ostentatiously well for so very long time (and in this successful thousand years would likely have changed beyond all recognition), the Romans were quite convinced that they had always remained the same.  Clearly the gods were with them, just as they were impeccably loyal to their gods, faithfully observing a meticulous and exact piety.  Or at least the gods were with the few Romans who had the education and leisure to write about their success.  In the late Empire, those Roman citizens who had social power and advantage lived comfortably on prosperous estates with reliable legal protections and first choice of all the goods of a wide-ranging trade zone.  Their advantages were guarded by an expensive professional army.  And though they had some political power (mostly local, though sometimes enough to worry an emperor) they had little reason to change the order of their world.  They saw little need for technological advancement or anything resembling an industrial revolution.  The elites lived comfortably because they had slaves to do the hard, unpleasant work.  The slaves themselves had very good reason to change the social order of things, but had few legal rights, even less power, and no voice to influence affairs, despite their numbers.  And so Rome fell gently into a stagnant stability, and eventually into a series of crises from which they had no social means to recover.  Conservative societies are like this, tending towards complacency and genteel decline.

Ancient Roman elites were much like people in general—though being conservatives, they would never admit so.  Human beings tend to be, by their inherited sociable nature, conservative.  But those who hold social advantages (including the somewhat-less-advantaged who fear losing the few advantages they have) are the ones most likely to align with explicitly conservative doctrines.  So it is no surprise that the advantaged tend to be conservative in thinking, and that conservatives in power tend to defend and protect prevailing inequalities.

Conservatives are rightfully loath to admit any of this.  They certainly don’t feel privileged or advantaged in any undeserved way—except of course for belonging to the league of decent, honest and upright folk rather than to the horde of disreputable, lazy and foreign kinds of living.  And they’re quite sure that if they did have privilege (which they’re not admitting!), they would most certainly deserve it, and probably deserve even more of it.  In the meantime, they’ll stand by anyone who convincingly assures them that they are the salt of the earth, that they have been recently underappreciated and hard done by, and that they should therefore return to a time when things were much better managed, when the right sort of people were in charge.  That time might be just around the corner if they can only find the right champion.  Who are these conservatives?  Perhaps you might have to look in that mirror over there.

One thing you can say for sure about conservatism is that it is always the same but seldom stays that way.